The Rescue of Belle and Sundance

by Birgit Stutz

  The mighty Fraser River, the rail line and the Robson Valley all follow the same trajectory—from the northwest to the southeast. Eons ago, the river would have overflowed its banks and cast up rich alluvial soil on the valley floor. Now just about every foot of available land on the Robson Valley floor is cultivated. The town of McBride sits on the river’s south bank, set back a respectful distance from the river and the raging torrents unleashed each spring when snow on the mountains melts.

  The Robson Valley may look paradisical, but of course it’s not. Because of high unemployment, the men and women who live here are forever heading elsewhere—to the oil fields of Alberta or the Middle East or points in-between—for work. Not all marriages survive such separations and stresses, and divorce and spousal abuse are issues here, as they are everywhere. And as I write these words, a rogue bear has for weeks been slaughtering cattle in the valley, including those in the fields right next to my own.

  Still, when the setting sun casts a pink glow on the snow-covered mountain passes in early summer, when a healthy foal arrives one day at a friend’s ranch and the next day at mine, when the cottonwoods are flashing new leaves and spring rain leaves the air smelling sweet, when our hummingbird feeders need air traffic controllers and the mountain creeks are rushing headlong to the Fraser, on such days I really do believe that I live in paradise.

  “Let the mountains move you,” it says below Valemount’s welcome sign built of massive fir logs, and we are moved.

  Somewhere up on those mountains roamed two horses. Glen Stanley knew about their presence there, as did Wes Phillips and the snowmobilers who had posted the horses’ photos on the sledding website.

  The view from the horses’ snowy pen, just below Mount Renshaw.

  The mechanism that spreads the news of unusual events in small towns now kicked into gear.

  And as tends to happen, a grain of truth got stretched and distorted as it flitted from one source to the next. One rumour had it that three horses, not two, had been spotted on the mountainside and that one horse was hobbled. Someone reported seeing horse tracks on the logging road further down the mountain—or were they moose tracks? Another rumour had it on good authority that the two lost pack horses were dead. Finally, a story circulating in a schoolyard claimed that a good Samaritan, a woman, had taken it upon herself to helicopter some hay up to the starving horses.

  Ray Long, having heard tell of the horse sightings on the Renshaw, knew where to go for reliable information. On the morning of Tuesday, December 9, he drove into town and walked into Spin Drift Power Sports, the place in McBride where locals head to get their snow machine fixed or replaced if need be. If there was any hope of finding and helping horses lost on that mountain, Ray knew snowmobiles and snowmobilers would have to play a part.

  A stocky man in his mid-seventies with a round, ruddy face and bushy eyebrows over light blue eyes, Ray is known to often be up to mischief. Here’s a sample: Luella (everyone calls her Lu), Ray’s wife, is a tall thin woman who still looks fit (she competed as a sprinter and hurdler in the 1952 Olympics). But with age, of course, come ailments and stiffness. Some of the townspeople can recite the story of what happened when Lu had a Reiki therapist over for a treatment. Operating on the theory that the body emanates energy fields, Reiki involves the sometimes rapid passing of the therapist’s hands over the patient’s body. Ray walked into the room and saw the therapist making flicking motions to the floor with her fingers. He asked her what she was doing.

  “I’m taking all the negative energy away from Lu,” the therapist answered.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” Ray exclaimed. “I’ll get a bucket. Don’t flick that stuff on the floor!”

  A kind and compassionate man, Ray finds great solace and satisfaction in his work, rising at dawn each day as he has all his life. His uniform is a collared western shirt and Wrangler jeans held up by a pair of bright red Carhartt suspenders (or “spenders,” as he calls them). On his six-hundred-acre farm, he runs seventy-five head of cattle, stables his older daughter’s three horses and operates the local large-animal pound—a place that houses stray horses and cattle until their owners can be located.

  In his younger days, Ray was a fine horseman who learned a lot from his father and Pat Smith, a cowboy pal of his dad’s. The two men had rodeoed with Pete Knight, the so-called king of the cowboys. Knight worked on a ranch at Crossfield, north of Calgary, and became a world champion bronc rider in the 1930s. He was killed in 1937—trampled at a rodeo in California.

  Ray will concede that “mountains make thin soup”—that is, you can’t live on scenery. But if he hasn’t travelled much, it’s because he loves this place and never wants to leave it. Ray has a long history and fond memories of trekking into the mountains with his horses. Handsomely framed and blown-up colour photographs of Ray leading pack horses across a mountain stream enjoy pride of place on his living room wall.

  “I like pack horses,” he once told me. “They did a lot of work for me.” If there were indeed horses on the Renshaw, he wanted to know so he could do something about it. Lu would echo that thought. “You can’t be a farmer,” she says, “and not have a soft spot for animals.”

  That day at Spin Drift Ray learned that there were horses up on the mountain, apparently abandoned, and they were starving. Angry, he got on the phone. Spread the word was his first thought.

  Ray Long called his friend Reg Marek, who had likewise spent many years trekking into the mountains with horses. Reg—a tall man of medium build, with glasses that give him a slightly scholarly look—has been taking pack horses into the mountains for forty years. Like Ray, Reg wears many hats in the valley: he is a cattle rancher, he boards horses, he is a trained farrier, he runs a tack shop (Kicking Horse Saddlery) for which he crafts gorgeous, custom-made western saddles, he is a farm-seed seller, and he is the local brand inspector (the strict tracking of cattle—birth, sale, death—helps control disease, prevent poaching and ensure that stolen or stray animals get back to their rightful owners). When Ray told Reg about the abandoned horses, Reg in turn called Monika Brown.

  It was shortly before nine o’clock that same evening that the phone rang at my house. It was Monika, my best friend, and she was distraught. “Reg just called and told me that there are two starving, abandoned horses in the Renshaw area,” she said. “Reg got it from Ray, who heard they were in very rough shape and possibly even dead by now.”

  I had a long list of questions for Monika. “Why are they up there? Who’s the owner? Where’s the owner?”

  Monika didn’t have the answers, but she was perhaps the first to act to find them. Cute and short in stature, Monika is a firebrand who won’t hesitate to write frank letters to the editor or to speak her mind—especially where the abuse of animals is concerned. “I’m an animal lover,” Monika says. “I once spent hours hacking into the ice to rescue a duck. It’s just a given.”

  Sixteen years ago, the two of us were working at a ranch in Hinton, Alberta, where our friendship formed and flourished. She loves horses as much as I do. Monika, her husband, Tim, and his twelve-year-old son, Justin, live on a small acreage outside McBride. She owns four horses, along with a dog and several cats.

  When Monika heard about those horses up on the mountain, she knew she had to help. The first thing she did was recruit her husband. Tim Brown called Barry Walline, president of the McBride Big Country Snowmobile Association and a member of the Robson Valley Search and Rescue team. Barry told Tim he had seen what looked to be horse tracks on the logging road, at kilometre twelve.

  The next day, December 10, Monika took a day off work—she’s a secretary at McBride Auto Body & Towing—and she and Tim, home for a few days from his job in the Alberta oil fields, rented a snowmobile from Spin Drift, which sits next door to Monika’s employer.

  “Conditions for sledding are really bad,” warned the shop’s co-owner, Glenn Daykin, who cited fresh snow in the mountains and unseasonably warm weather. This was perhaps a
bit of good news for Belle and Sundance, but bad news for their would-be rescuers.

  Despite the warning, Monika and Tim decided to give it a try. At kilometre twenty-four on the logging road, they ran into the man contracted to maintain the sledding trails on Mount Renshaw and two areas nearby. He advised them that they’d reached the end of the groomed trail and should go no further, adding that even veteran riders on more powerful snowmobiles than theirs were getting stuck in the deep and heavy snow. A disappointed Monika and Tim turned back. They’d seen no sign of horses, but they had found hay on the trail at kilometre twelve on the logging road. The couple didn’t know what to make of that. Had some sledders heard about the horses and brought them hay? Was this the owner’s doing? Had he brought the horses partway out and fed them along the way? How long had that hay been there? All these questions . . . and no answers.

  Later that same day, Monika called local outfitter Stan Walchuk after hearing that he might have information about the lost horses. Stan would only say that the owner was a fellow named Frank and that he lived in Alberta and had come to Stan for help a while back. In Stan’s opinion, the owner wasn’t negligent, just too inexperienced to be in the mountains with horses by himself. Finally, Stan told Monika that the owner had been up to see the horses the weekend before, that they were beyond rescuing, and he assumed that the owner had done the right thing and put the horses out of their misery.

  The following day, Monika dropped in to Glenn Daykin’s shop to get the latest information. There were no updated sightings, but there was a promising lead in solving the mystery of who owned the lost horses. A sledder from Alberta had called Daykin early in December, reported the lost horses and asked if local sledders could get back to him if they spotted the animals. He had apparently accompanied the pack horses’ owner on a snowmobile in an attempt to extricate them on December 5.

  When Monika finally got through to that sledder on Friday, December 12, he confirmed the story. “The horses were in terrible shape,” he told Monika on the telephone. “Rest assured. They’re dead by now.”

  “Did you put the horses down?” she asked him.

  “No,” he replied. “We didn’t have a gun.” Monika asked him if there was ever any plan to go back to euthanize the horses, but he didn’t answer the question.

  Monika had called the man out of curiosity, hoping that he had some answers about the abandoned horses. She took notes as they talked, for she intended to pass on to Ray and Reg and me and anyone else who shared an interest whatever information she managed to collect. But Monika grew frustrated as the exchange continued. It must have been clear that at that time of year the horses would be in rough shape—but they brought no gun? She asked several times for the name of the owner, but the sledder declined to share it. “I don’t want to judge the man,” he told her. “Besides, it wouldn’t help the horses any more if the guy got into trouble. I saw the owner crying over his horses. I think he’s suffered enough.”

  Even though he wouldn’t name names, he did fill in a few gaps in the horses’ story. Without going into specifics, he told Monika that Belle and Sundance’s owner had made two elaborate attempts to save his horses, had done everything he could—and that there were a lot of other animals suffering in the world.

  “People are more concerned about the welfare of animals than they are about the welfare of people,” he said.

  This is a commonly expressed response to the suffering of animals, and Monika finds it bizarre. Surely every act of generosity has its own genesis? Where is it written that showing kindness to animals comes at the expense of kindness to humans? Helping is helping. Period. Had there been people stuck up on that mountain, Monika and a great many others in the valley would have felt the same instinct to help.

  “I grew up on a farm,” he told Monika, “and I’ve seen lots of animals die.” He said he himself had once shot starving animals on a neighbouring farm when their owner could no longer afford to feed them.

  Monika returned to her question. “Should the horses have been euthanized to stop their suffering?”

  “Yes,” came the reply.

  “Then why wasn’t that taken care of?”

  Silence.

  Though she was doing her best to remain outwardly polite, Monika was seething inside. “I hope you can sleep at night,” she said.

  “I sleep just fine, don’t worry.”

  That same day, as Monika put it, “All hell broke loose.” Temperatures rose, then plummeted. At least two feet of fresh snow fell on Mount Renshaw, thwarting the efforts of snowmobilers trying to deliver propane cylinders to the warming cabin. The perilous conditions resulted in numerous reports of sledders getting stuck or hurt. Members of the Robson Valley Search and Rescue team were called upon when an Alberta snowmobiler was seriously injured near the warming cabin on Mount Lucille—another popular snowmobiling area west of McBride.

  The news of the blizzard pretty well, but not entirely, crushed any hope of rescuing those horses. Those of us in their corner feared that their chance of survival was slim in that snow and cold. And even if, somehow, the horses remained alive, the dump of snow surely cut off any access to them. Still, none of us would accept assumptions. If the horses were dead, we needed evidence of that fact.

  That night I drove to Valemount to attend a Christmas party put on by the Valley Sentinel, the weekly newspaper I write for on a freelance basis. I asked people there if they had heard anything about the abandoned horses, but no one had. I enjoyed my prime rib steak at the Caribou Grill, an imposing round-log building with a cathedral ceiling, but all the while, I couldn’t stop thinking about those horses.

  The sixty-kilometre drive home took longer than usual, the roads icy from the trace of snow that had fallen earlier. The night sky dazzled with stars, like so many jewels scattered on black velvet. It was close to eleven o’clock when I arrived home. I checked the thermometer outside the basement door: fifteen degrees Celsius below zero.

  I had by this point convinced myself that the abandoned horses must have succumbed. Given the snow and dropping temperatures, given what the sledder had said, I was certain, and Monika was certain, the two horses were dead and gone. What I felt most that night was a dull sadness. But until we knew their fate with certainty, we could not stop thinking about them.

  Just after midnight on December 12, and seven days after their owner left Belle and Sundance to die on Mount Renshaw, someone down in the valley made a small plea on their behalf.

  Glenn Daykin is thirty-four years old, a lean man with a shaven head and tattoos on his arms. The part owner of Spin Drift Power Sports, he has been fixing machines since he was fourteen years old and has lived most of his life in small-town British Columbia. His shop on 2nd Avenue, fronted by turquoise steel siding, is chock full of snowmobiles, four-wheelers, helmets and all the other accoutrements you would expect in a place that rents and repairs machines that scoot over land or snow. The air in the shop is redolent of hard plastic and motor oil, and the gleaming snow machines look much bigger and more powerful up close.

  Glenn had been in the shop one day in late November when several sledders came in with some odd news.

  “You’re not going to believe what we saw up on Mount Renshaw,” one told him. And, at first, Glenn didn’t believe them. His initial reaction was stupefaction. Glenn grew up on a farm, and while machines are his bread and butter, he knows horses, too. When he asked around, he was told that a local outfitter had the situation well in hand. But when sledders kept returning to his shop with news of more sightings and when the weather turned increasingly foul, he knew he had to act. In the appeal he would broadcast on the sledders’ forum, Glenn reported what he had been hearing from sledders. Some dates and details were wrong: Glenn was under the impression that the man who had left the horses behind was a hunter who had gone up there in October. But some parts of Glenn’s plea were spot on: he said that with the heavy snow on the mountains, the horses would be in desperate shape, that horses didn
’t deserve this treatment and that many people in the valley had expressed concern about them. He appealed for more information “on this sad situation.”

  Glenn Daykin had sent out an SOS. But with Christmas less than two weeks away, with the valley economy so distressed, with everyone so busy with shopping and all the other obligations of the holiday season, would anyone respond? Would the plight of two pack horses register on the Robson Valley radar?

  On Saturday, December 13, I attended another Christmas party—this one at Monika and Tim’s house. Overnight, the temperature had plummeted. It was thirty degrees below zero at my place when I walked up to the highway that evening to wait for my ride. The boards on the porch groaned and cracked, the snow crunched loudly underfoot, and my nostrils pinched in the cold. At these temperatures, exposed skin is vulnerable to frostbite in as little as fifteen minutes. The trick is to dress in layers and pay special attention to protecting the extremities—head, hands and feet—where the heat loss is most acute.

  I knew before I left the house, before walking outside, that it was exceptionally frosty. Sound seems to travel better in such wicked cold. The sound of the tires on the highway—cold hard rubber meeting cold hard pavement—is a noise like nothing else. And there is something about such arctic temperatures that casts a stillness over everything. As I stood by the roadway, I admired the beautiful, clear night and the star-dappled sky. A bitter wind blew, and snow drifted across the top part of the road. Glad that I had decided to wear my warm winter boots, I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and pulled it up over my ears. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long for my ride.

  The talk of the evening was those horses up the Renshaw. Ray and Lu were there, and Ray, especially, felt terrible that the horses had been abandoned on the mountain. He wished he could have helped save them. We were torn between faint hope that the horses might endure even this cold—but then what?—and a wish that death had come to end their suffering. Neither thought offered comfort.